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TIJUANA – The city's entire 2,300-member municipal police force has been ordered to turn in its weapons, leaving doubt Thursday about who would be patrolling this city of more than 1.5 million residents. The surprise directive from Mexico's Defense Secretariat comes a day after President Felipe Calderon ordered Operation Tijuana, a major offensive against organized crime in the city. More than 3,000 soldiers and federal agents are being sent to the city with the aim of tackling the city's crime problems. Federal officials were expected to conduct ballistics tests on the weapons, apparently to see if they could link any...

Jose Alonso Compean and Ignacio Ramos, were sentenced to 12 years and 11 years, respectively, in October by U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Cardone in El Paso, Texas. The drug smuggler was granted immunity for his testimony.

MEXICO CITY — In the wake of bombings, civil unrest and potential for further mayhem, the U.S. government is advising Americans to be careful anywhere in this country. Officials cautioned late Wednesday that while U.S. citizens aren't specifically being targeted, they should be aware of their surroundings, especially when near large political gatherings. "This is not a broad brush or anything that says do not go to Mexico; we are saying to be careful in Mexico due to the potential for violence," said a U.S. Embassy official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The State Department issued a formal advisory that...

Los Angeles, CA. According to 33 year veteran gang specialist and retired L.A. Sheriff’s Sergeant Richard Valdemar, Mexican drug cartels have infiltrated city councils and political campaigns in many small cities in Los Angeles County.

Homeland Security panel also says traffickers are forming ties with U.S.-based gangs The U.S. Border Patrol and other law enforcement agencies at the U.S.-Mexico border are outgunned by increasingly ruthless and well-armed Mexican drug cartels, a new congressional report concludes. "The cartels use automatic assault weapons, bazookas, grenade launchers and improvised explosive devices," the House Homeland Security oversight subcommittee report said. "In contrast, U.S. Border Patrol agents are issued 40-caliber Beretta semiautomatic pistols." The report, scheduled to be released today by U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, said drug cartels are able to break the encryptions on Border Patrol and sheriffs'...

*** NOTE*** Take your blood pressure medication before viewing this report... McCaul Releases Report on Border Violence (Tuesday, October 17, 2006) Today, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (TX), Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Investigations, released a report on border violence in the Southwest. The report examines the alarming rise in the level of criminal cartel activity, including drug and human smuggling, along the Texas-Mexico border and its effects on Federal, State and local law enforcement agencies. The report also looks at what steps are being taken to counter the threat, and the significance of these issues pertaining...

CALEXICO — A U.S. Border Patrol agent fired once at a group of suspected smugglers as the group reportedly attempted to assault another agent along the New River, officials said today. No one was wounded in the shooting, Border Patrol said. One Border Patrol agent suffered an injured knee when he fell while trying to back away from the smugglers who were throwing rocks and running at the agent, officials said. The case occurred about 5 p.m. Friday near the old Vons facility in the western portion of Calexico. Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Lloyd Frers said two agents were working...

MEXICO CITY - Electoral officials said Tuesday that they will burn the ballots from the disputed presidential election despite calls from both candidates to spare them. Luis Carlos Ugalde, chairman of the Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE, said in a letter to President-elect Felipe Calderon that a 1990 law clearly called for the burning of the ballots from the July 2 election. "The IFE is obliged to destroy electoral documentation once the electoral process is concluded," Ugalde wrote. No date was set for the burning. Leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador had asked that the ballots be saved, claiming fraud...

The seven-judge panel known as the TRIFE, charged with deciding the legitimacy of Mexico's murky July 2 election and confirming the new president, is the nation's court of last resort. What the judges decree is literally the last word, the end of the line; there is no appeal. On September 5, the last day the Constitution mandated the TRIFE to rule on the most hotly contested balloting in Mexico's checkered electoral history, the judges pronounced their verdict: Outgoing President Vicente Fox's unconstitutional intervention in the electoral process on behalf of his handpicked successor, Felipe Calderón, had put the election "at...

FIVE severed human heads were thrown onto a dance floor in a crowded disco in western Mexico, officials said. Authorities blamed the grisly scene on rival drug gangs. “Hooded men dressed in black stormed into a bar, fired into the air and threw down five heads,” said Rosaura Trujillo, a spokeswoman for the Michoacan state prosecutor's office. The men also left a card with the message: “The family does not kill for money. It does not kill women. It does not kill innocents. It kills only those who deserve to die. Everyone take note - this is divine justice.” According...

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's attorney general said the arrest a group of corrupt cops along the border with California is imminent. Daniel Cabeza de Vaca told a Mexico City news conference today the cops protected a Tijuana cartel, the Arellano Felix gang, which smuggled tons of pot, cocaine and meth into the United States. Two were already arrested Saturday and charged with taking bribes to protect the gang. The attorney general said they worked at the Rosarito police department just over the border from San Diego border. The two are accused of decapitating three of their fellow officers. The news...

Illegal marijuana production is surging on the North Coast and across the state as a result of rising dominance of Mexican crime families over the state's underground pot economy. Scores of Mexican nationals are being sneaked across the border to grow, guard and harvest marijuana gardens inside California because tightened border security has crimped smuggling of Mexican-grown pot into the state, according to local, state and federal drug agents. Mexican-controlled operations now account for as much as 70 percent of all the marijuana cultivated in the state's rural regions, including the North Coast, the agents said. Agents say tightened U.S.-Mexican...

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (Reuters) - Despite U.S. efforts to stop left-wing Nicaraguan politician Daniel Ortega from returning to power, a poll released on Tuesday showed he maintained a six-point lead over rival presidential candidates. Ortega, who headed the socialist Sandinista government in the 1980s, had the support of 29 percent of those surveyed, according to a poll by Cid-Gallup. Twenty-three percent said they backed conservative banker and former Foreign Minister Eduardo Montealegre. A June Cid-Gallip poll also gave Ortega a six-point lead. Washington, which backed Contra rebels who battled the Soviet-supported Sandinista government, has criticized Ortega as "undemocratic" and tried to...

In a large raid preceding the harvest season, the Jackson County Sheriff's Department has seized 2,500 marijuana plants with a street value estimated at up to $12.5 million. Two men found at the scattered gardens near Hyatt Lake on Monday remain in Jackson County Jail on immigration holds and the investigation is continuing, Jackson County Sheriff Mike Winters said. Officials had watched the growing operation, believed to be linked to a Mexican drug cartel, and swept in Monday to destroy it just before harvest time, sheriff's Lt. Pat Rowland said. SWAT teams from Jackson and Douglas counties and Oregon State...

The first of 6,000 National Guard troops President Bush wants to station on the southwest border will be deployed next month, assigned to fly helicopters to spot illegal aliens, lay sensors to detect their movement, and build roads and barriers to help the U.S. Border Patrol do its job. "We're trained, we're ready to do this, and we're able to do this," said Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau. But Mr. Bush's border mobilization plan is being questioned by besieged state and local law-enforcement authorities battling rapidly escalating violence by heavily armed alien and drug...

The chief law enforcement officers of several Texas counties along the southern U.S. border warn that Arabic-speaking individuals are learning Spanish and integrating into Mexican culture before paying smugglers to sneak them into the United States. The Texas Sheriffs' Border Coalition believes those individuals are likely terrorists and that drug cartels and some members of the Mexican military are helping them get across the border. Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez of Zapata County, Texas told Cybercast News Service that Iranian currency, military badges in Arabic, jackets and other clothing are among the items that have been discovered along the banks of the...

LAREDO - Local sheriffs this morning testified in front of a congressional subcommittee of potential vulnerabilities to terrorism along the Southern Border. "There is an infrastructure in place just waiting to be exploited," Webb County Sheriff Rick Flores told members of the House International Relations Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation. Flores and Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez shared stories about hunters being surprised by black-clad gunmen, a Starr County jailer who was found executed in Mexico, and Iraqi dinars found on a ranch trail as part of the divisive testimony. Congressional Democrats accused the Republican-dominated subcommittee of playing politics...

Police on Monday found a decapitated body wrapped in a blanket and a human head stuffed in a plastic bag along a road outside Monterrey. Police patrolling the area found the body, which has not been identified, and two notes to reputed drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán of the Sinaloa cartel, said Marcelo Garza, director of investigations for Nuevo León. One note read, "These are the ones who are killing in Laredo and also in Guadalajara under the orders of Efraín, El Beto y El Pipo. They are El Chapo´s people." The second note accused the government of protecting...

Hitmen strafe two women with machine guns, severed heads are dumped in garbage bags near the U.S. border and outside public offices in Acapulco, a police chief is gunned town in a Caribbean tourist resort. The grisly murders, all in the past week, are among the latest in an increasingly savage and spectacular wave of drug gang violence sweeping across Mexico as the country heads to the polls in a presidential vote on Sunday. The dead are victims of an all-out war between rival gangs for control of the multibillion-dollar cocaine, marijuana and amphetamine trade to the United States which...

Acapulco, Mexico, Jun 30 (EFE).- This world-renowned resort city on Mexico's Pacific coast is being repeatedly shocked by the discovery of menacingly placed human heads separated from slain individuals linked to drug-trafficking or the fighting of that crime. Authorities found Friday two human heads in front of a government office and later located the headless bodies in a vacant lot in Acapulco, the scene in recent weeks of clashes between drug traffickers and police. The two heads were found before dawn outside the offices of the Finance Secretariat of the Guerrero state government in the vicinity of La Garita, authorities...

Tijuana, Mexico, Jun 21 (EFE).- The decapitated bodies of four people, including three police officers, were found Wednesday in northern Mexico near the U.S. border, authorities said. The four individuals went missing Tuesday night and on Wednesday morning their bodies were found wrapped in blankets in the Pacific coast city of Rosarito and their heads in bags in Tijuana, said Rosarito police chief Valente Montijo. He identified the dead as police officers Ismael Arellano Torres, Jesus Hernandez and Adrian Ventura, and civilian Fernando Aguilar, a Mexican-American resident of Arizona. According to Montijo, the cops and the other man - who...

Mexican drug cartels operating in cities in the U.S. are buying up legitimate businesses to launder money and using some of the proceeds to win local mayoral and city council seats for politicians who can shape the policies and personnel decisions of their police forces, according to Rep. Tom Tancredo "The Tijuana-based Felix drug cartel and the Juarez-based Fuentes cartel began buying legitimate business in small towns in Los Angeles County in the early 1990s," "They purchased restaurants, used-car lots, auto-body shops and other small businesses. One of their purposes was to use these businesses for money-laundering operations. Once established...

NOGALES, Mexico - Patricia Lopez's journey toward a better life in the United States ended with a nighttime robbery, a twisted ankle and a Border Patrol escort to the frontier — where she was dumped at dawn without a peso in her pocket, 1,575 miles from home. She's far from alone: Nearly 1 million people, many of them penniless, were turned back across the border last year, and analysts fear that tougher new U.S. border enforcement will inundate border towns with the desperate and the destitute. Migrant shelter directors are scrambling for funds and considering hiring more staff to keep...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Workers clearing piles of garbage from a beach in Acapulco found an unpleasant reminder of the seamier side of Mexico's Pacific resort, which has seen dozens of murders this year -- a decomposing human head. The head washed in from the ocean and appeared to be that of a man around 40 years old, Reforma newspaper said on its Web site on Wednesday. The head was discovered by state workers cleaning the beach. Police believe the slayings are related to drugs trafficking. In April suspected drug gang hitmen decapitated two policemen and placed their heads outside...

LAS VEGAS - Mayors from more than 200 U.S. cities urged President Bush and Congress on Monday to pass comprehensive immigration reform, including a guest worker program, but they could not agree on a proposal to build a 300-mile fence along the border. The U.S. Conference of Mayors declined to back a resolution opposing the fence, which would be built along the Rio Grande river in Texas. Critics said the fence would harm relations between the U.S. and Mexico. Virginia Beach, Va., Mayor Meyera Oberndorf said the fence would be "un-American." "We've always had open borders between Mexico and Canada,...

WESLACO — It’s a horrific, perhaps all-too common scenario. Masked men armed with high-powered weapons storm a home and often gag and beat the homeowner — or anyone — in sight. Most perpetrators know exactly what they are looking for: sometimes large amounts of cash, sometimes bundles of drugs. Other times, in stranger-to-stranger invasions, perpetrators target homes in affluent neighborhoods that appear to hold valuables inside. Since last July, there have been eight reported cases of home invasions — seven of them violent. In half of the reported cases, there was some type of relationship between the victim and the...

Police enraged by the kidnapping of six officers club unarmed detainees. A bloody battle between steelworkers and police leaves two miners dead. Drug lords post the heads of decapitated police on a fence to show who's in charge. Less than two months before Mexicans elect their next president, many fear the country is teetering on the edge of chaos a perception that could hurt the ruling National Action Party's chances of keeping the presidency and benefit Mexico's once-powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party, whose candidate has been trailing badly. Some blame President Vicente Fox for a weak government. Others say rivals are...

By Steve Holland and Randall Palmer CHICHEN ITZA, Mexico, March 30 (Reuters) - Mexican President Vicente Fox played tour guide to U.S. President George W. Bush at ancient Mayan ruins on Thursday before holding talks to urge him to push through long-sought U.S. immigration reform. Hosting a North American summit, Fox planned to offer tighter border controls and incentives to lure some illegal immigrants home, a pledge meant to help Bush convince a skeptical Congress to let more Mexicans work legally in the United States. Bush and Fox, joined by new Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper at Mexico's rowdy beach...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's president will approve a law that decriminalizes possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and other drugs to concentrate on fighting violent narco gangs, the government said on Tuesday. President Vicente Fox will not oppose the bill, passed by senators last week, presidential spokesman Ruben Aguilar told reporters, despite likely tensions with the United States. "The president is going to sign that law, there would be no objection," he said. "It appears to be a good law and an advance in combating narcotics trafficking." The approval of the legislation, passed earlier by the lower house...

I find it incredible that the Mexican Congress passed legislation that would make it legal to possess, carry and use small amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and other drugs. Mexican Vicente Fox must sign off on it for the proposal to become law, and some think he will. Now I know that a proposal that may or may not be approved does not have a lot to do with immigration. But talk about sending the wrong signals. Mexico desperately wants a guest-worker program. It wants the U.S. to ease immigration laws to make it easier for its citizens to escape...

Drug limits List of maximum allowable drug quantities approved for personal use by Mexico's Congress:Opium: (raw, to be smoked): 5 grams Heroin: 25 milligrams Marijuana: 5 grams Cocaine: 500 milligrams LSD: .015 milligrams MDA: 200 milligrams MDMA (Ecstasy): 200 milligrams Mescaline: 1 gram Peyote: 1 kilogram Psilocybin (concentrate, pure, active ingredient): 100 milligrams Hallucinogenic mushrooms (raw, off the farm): 250 milligrams Amphetamines: 100 milligrams Dexamphetamines: 40 milligrams Phencyclidine (PCP, or Angel Dust): 7 milligrams Methamphetamines: 200 milligrams Nalbuphine (synthetic opiate): 10 milligrams Psilocybin (concentrate, pure, active ingredient): 100 milligrams Hallucinogenic mushrooms (raw, off the farm): 250 milligrams Amphetamines: 100 milligrams...

TULTITLAN, Mexico (AP) -- Considered felons by the government, these migrants fear detention, rape and robbery. Police and soldiers hunt them down at railroads, bus stations and fleabag hotels. Sometimes they are deported; more often officers simply take their money. While migrants in the United States have held huge demonstrations in recent weeks, the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Central Americans in Mexico suffer mostly in silence.

CANCUN, Mexico -- Mexican President Vicente Fox said his government was preparing to extradite at least 24 drug traffickers to the United States, but he ruled out using police to stop migrants on Mexico's side of the border. Speaking to reporters in Cancun, where he was meeting with President Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Fox said Thursday he couldn't release the names of the traffickers facing extradition, and warned they might react violently to the prospect of being sent abroad. "This will be punishment for them because we'll take them out of Mexico so they stop operating," Fox...

NUEVO LAREDO - Acting on direct orders from President Vicente Fox, soldiers took up positions along international bridges from here to Matamoros, searching nearly every vehicle headed into the United States. At the Juarez-Lincoln Bridge and International Bridge I, the armed soldiers dressed in camouflage fatigues were stopping vehicles according to an undisclosed random pattern. The searches will be conducted around the clock for an unspecified length of time, and all drivers using the bridges in either direction are asked to slow down as they approach the checkpoints. Identified as the "Frontera Segura" program, it's designed to help curb the...

Mexico's Defense Secretary said on Friday that officials have identified men dressed in military garb who helped drug traffickers in Hudspeth County in January. And he says they are not soldiers. Gerardo Clemente Vega told a Mexico City news conference the men involved in the January 23rd border incident are Jose Rodolfo Escajeda Escajeda, Alonso Escajeda Candelaria, Jaime Fernandez Jurado and Cesar Gandara. The four are still at large. Vega says Escajeda Escajeda has been linked to drug traffickers in Chihuahua. Hudspeth County Deputies spotted three vehicles driving in the United States along I-10, and began a chase which led...

A federal task force seized arsenals of illegal weapons and homemade bombs in Laredo, Texas, in connection with a Mexican drug trafficking battle, authorities said Friday. The feds captured more than 30 homemade bombs, grenade components, assault weapons, silencers, machine gun assembly kits, bulletproof vests, police scanners and cash, Julie Myers, assistant secretary of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a statement. Two of the bombs had been completed and others were under assembly, said officials from the task force that involved Immigration and Customs Enforcement, FBI, local authorities and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Authorities...

An American law enforcement officer and news crew in Texas have witnessed another armed incursion into the United States by men dressed in Mexican army attire, the second such incident in just two weeks. The deputy and news crew were on the scene Tuesday night to film a segment about last week's incursion, when the law officer noticed more "soldiers" emerge from a clearing on the U.S. side of the border. "They are doing the classic thing, flanking around each side of us and actually coming up into the U.S. and trying to figure out what we are doing; they...

In the past few days, Hudspeth County Sheriff's Department deputies and their families have received threats to stay off the Rio Grande. Sheriff Arvin West told ABC-7 Thursday morning, before departing for Houston that the Mexican military is behind all of this. Sheriff West said, "There is no doubt in my mind -- from the first time going back to a couple of years ago and every time in between --- it's the Mexican military. In a nutshell, everybody's been trying to tell everybody that they were here...they've been here ...[and] they come here quite often, regularly."

Expect more violence as officers move into more areas along the border, said the national chief of CBP Border Patrol during a Saturday visit to Laredo. Chief David Aguilar visited Laredo to address concerns raised by recent instances of violence against Border Patrol agents. He said assaults on agents in the Laredo sector are occurring at a record pace. As more agents get assigned to the border, the Border Patrol is taking control of areas that have been historically used by criminal gangs who are reluctant to give them up, Aguilar said. Danger to agents will continue to increase until...

"U.S. agents had been investigating the possibility of an elaborate drug-smuggling tunnel between Tijuana and San Diego for more than a year, but couldn't find it despite using military equipment so advanced it's classified" ~snip "“This tunnel beats them all,” said Michael Unzueta, special agent in charge of the San Diego office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, " ~snip "“People are always going to find a way around us,” he said."

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Authorities have found what they call the largest tunnel running into the United States along the U.S.-Mexican border. About 2 tons of marijuana were inside the tunnel, the Drug Enforcement Administration said, indicating that it appears to have been used to transport drugs. DEA and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents discovered the tunnel Wednesday night. It runs from Tijuana, Mexico, to Otay Mesa, California. Officials said the tunnel is about seven-tenths of a mile (1,148 meters) or more than 1,200 yards long. Initial reports said it is 5 feet high and 3.5 feet wide.

Texas law enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents engaged in an armed standoff with Mexican military personnel and drug smugglers just inside the United States along the Rio Grande yesterday afternoon. According to a report in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin of Ontario, Calif., both Texas law enforcement and the FBI stated nearly 30 American agents were part of the incident. Chief Deputy Mike Doyal of the Hudspeth County Sheriff's Department told the paper Mexican military Humvees were towing what appeared to be thousands of pounds of marijuana across the border into the United States. Border Patrol agents called for...

He denies it all now. It is unclear why he would have asserted it all in this phone call, however, if it were not true. Of course, there could be any number of reasons. But this case bears monitoring. "Infiltration from the south feared: Terrorist smuggling denied by admitted drug runner," from The Brownsville Herald, with thanks to Richard: Officials are pointing to records in a South Texas drug case with alleged terrorist ties that they say underscores the lack of preparedness here. The attorney for a jailed Gulf Cartel member cited in the incident, however, says his client was...

Confidential Memo Warns Of Hired Assassins SAN DIEGO -- Federal officials have warned U.S. Border Patrol agents that they could be the targets of assassins hired by immigrant smugglers, according to a confidential memo. "Unidentified Mexican alien smugglers are angry about the increased security along the U.S./Mexico border and have agreed that the best way to deal with U.S. Border Patrol agents is to hire a group of contract killers," the Department of Homeland Security said in a Dec. 21 Officer Safety Alert. The alert states that the smugglers intend to bring members of the Mara Salvatrucha street gang --...

Diplomats from Mexico and Central America on Monday demanded guest worker programs and the legalization of undocumented migrants in the United States, while criticizing a U.S. proposal for tougher border enforcement.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The leftist favored to win Mexico's presidential election in July accused President Vicente Fox on Sunday of being too soft in opposing Washington's tough new efforts to prevent illegal immigration. A plan by the U.S. Congress to build a fence on parts of the U.S.-Mexican border has upset many Mexicans and anger was compounded late last month when a Border Patrol agent in the San Diego area fatally shot a young Mexican man who had tried to enter the United States illegally. Mexico has demanded an investigation into the shooting and Fox described the fence proposal...

Mexican lawmakers will ask their U.S. counterparts to move up a scheduled meeting on immigration to February from March, Mexico´s speaker of the lower house of Congress said. Congressman Heliodoro Díaz said Mexican senators and representatives will form a joint committee to lobby the U.S. Senate to reject a bill, approved by the U.S. House on Dec. 16, that calls for adding 700 miles of fence on the U.S.-Mexico border. "One of the first tasks would be to move up the date, to not wait until March for the inter-parliamentary meeting," Díaz said in a telephone interview in Mexico City....

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico demanded a U.S. investigation on Monday into the death of an undocumented Mexican shot by a U.S. Border Patrol agent as he tried to cross into California last week. Raul Martinez, a spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol in San Diego, confirmed that an agent had fired on a man on Friday as he tried to cross the border near San Diego, after the would-be immigrant had thrown rocks at him. The unidentified man crossed back into Mexico, where he later died of his injuries in a hospital. "The Mexican government is demanding an investigation...

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia - Socialist Evo Morales appears assured of becoming Bolivia's next president, according to unofficial results Monday, an outcome that would solidify South America's shift toward the political left. Morales, who has promised to end a U.S.-backed crusade to eliminate coca, the crop used to make cocaine, may have won a clear majority in Sunday's vote, which would avoid having Bolivia's congress choose among the top two vote-getters in January. His closest challenger among seven other candidates received only about 30 percent, independent counts showed.

A marijuana-laden dump truck got stuck in the Rio Grande on Thursday evening in Hudspeth County, leading to a standoff between U.S. law enforcement and what appeared to be the Mexican military, sheriff officials said. "It's a very serious incident," Hudspeth County Chief Deputy Mike Doyal said. "We are very fortunate (Thursday) night no one got hurt," Doyal said. "Everyone had the presence of mind not to cause an international incident, or start shooting." The incident began when Border Patrol agents tried to stop the dump truck on Interstate 10, sheriff's officials said. The truck fled to Mexico in the...